TVA’s Bellefonte still carries ghost label
May 4, 2009
With declining sales and skyrocketing costs (there, I’ve said it anyway, “sales” implies a “profit” somewhere and TVA is not supposed to make a profit), it was a wise move for TVA to be replaced in the drive for two new-concept Westinghouse reactors at Bellefonte.
No doubt that TVA has been the laggard in moving forward with the NuStart design concept thereby dragging down the whole consortium of nuclear interests. TVA is (was) supposed to have the “flexibility” of a corporation with the power of the federal government to move quickly in the marketplace, the very marketplace it is trying to displace.
TVA’s record shows that it is neither quick to move or competent enough to lead in these muddied times. There’s an old military saying that bears repeating. “Lead, follow, or get out of the way”.
If TVA ever played a leadership role it was many decades ago; it resists following common-sense rules and fights them at every turn at a huge legal expense for everyone. So now it is time for TVA to “get out of the way” and let natural entrepreneurial progress thrive again in the Southeast, it’s time for TVA to get out of everybody’s hair.
Because TVA is purely a political animal, it never will be nor should it be accepted as a legitimate competitor in our free-market system, in fact, TVA is totally anti-competition in a sham corporate cloak.
Without touting the good or bad of nuclear power, TVA has proved at a cost of billions of wasted dollars that it does not know how “to run a railroad”, all facets of the electricity production and distribution kind. Two huge shells of uncompleted nuclear reactor towers loom over Bellefonte, Alabama now a ghost town. They are as pawns at the hands of the TVA in another failed scheme.
TVA claims on paper that nuclear reactor Unit 1 was about 88% complete and Unit 2 approximately 58% complete at the time construction ceased in 1988. Construction permits were granted in 1974. This is very old nuclear technology.
In the meantime, TVA cannibalized the two units for parts needed on other TVA plants becoming a kind of junkyard for the TVA. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says TVA now must reconstruct all of the paperwork and procedures extant when construction stopped in 1988. This would seem an almost impossible task since TVA did not care about preserving the two sites for perhaps later use as nuclear reactors.
With an aging stock of various power plants requiring more and more maintenance, TVA is forced to spend more on them while electricity usage has dropped nearly 10% year-to-year. Already strapped with millions in debt payments, TVA would normally be called insolvent if it were an investor-owned utility.
Wildly overspent, it is time to dissolve the TVA by selling off its assets to the highest bidder while trying to pay some of its $25 billion debt.
Ernest Norsworthy
emnorsworthy@earthlink.net
http://norsworthyopinion.com